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Anime
= The History of Anime = "Anime." Depending on who you are, the word can conjure up images of exciting adventures, stylized art, or your teenage daughter talking excitedly about her current obsession. In Japan, the word refers to any kind of animation at all, but the rest of the world has adopted it to mean animation specifically from Japan. Why the distinction? Isn’t animation just a bunch of moving drawings no matter which country you draw them in? We don’t have a specific, well-known word for animation from any other part of the world. How did anime come to be regarded as special and grow into the stylized medium we know and love today? The answer stretches back to just one year shy of a century ago... 1917: A Century Ago The first animated film released in Japan, and therefore the first anime, was probably released in late 1916 or very early ‘17 by Shimokawa Oten, made with chalk, and less than five minutes long. The uncertainty comes from the fact that most early Japanese films were dismantled after the reels were finished. What survived that practice was largely lost with the destruction of many film studios and theaters in the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, destroyed in the bombings of World War 2, or simply disintegrated over time. The nitrocellulose early films were printed on was extremely flimsy and incredibly flammable – not exactly a good recipe for preservation. The first Japanese animated film we know for certain was commercially released was Dekobo Shingacho - Meian no Shippai (Dekobo’s New Picture Book - Failure of a Great Plan) in February of 1917 - but 1917 saw the release of nearly twenty short animated films in Japan! It was the midst of World War 1 and animation was a new curiosity. Manga artists Oten Shimokawa and Junichi Kouchi and painter Seitaro Kitayama were fascinated by this new medium. Hired by existing film studios and working with very small crews, these three men were responsible for the remarkable output that first year and have been nicknamed “the fathers of anime.” The films they made did not look like the anime being made today. The runtimes were exceedingly short, usually in the five-minute range, and they did not use transparent cels or color. The earliest films were made with chalk on a board, erasing and re-drawing the lines in-between camera takes. This technique was quickly succeeded by the slightly less labor-intensive process of using paper cutouts - essentially 2D stop-motion animation. The films were silent, but probably accompanied by live music and certainly accompanied by “benshi,” storytellers who stood by the screen and narrated the film for the audience. But while the films looked different, the content would be familiar to anyone who watches anime today. They told funny stories about samurai, brought Japanese folk tales to life, and promoted the Japanese mail system. It’s a line-up you could find in just about any year of the last decade. The films of 1917 were made for existing film companies. In 1921, Kitayama left Nikkatsu, the company he had been working for, to found the very first anime studio, Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo. Kouchi followed his footsteps and founded his own animation studio, Sumikazu, in 1923. Neither studio survived the decade, unfortunately. It’s difficult to make money with anime, and the Great Kanto Earthquake wiping out the Kitayama building so soon after establishment didn’t help. The 1930s and ‘40s: Technology and War Despite difficulties with destroyed studios, low funding, and the laborious cut-out process, anime continued. In the 1930s, another pioneer rose to prominence: Kenzo Masaoka. He debuted the first anime with synced, pre-recorded voices (a “talkie”) in 1933 after a year of production. Titled Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka (Within the World of Power and Women), it was a rather salacious story about a man having an affair with his secretary after growing tired of his domineering wife. (Feminism was not a big concern in animation at the time.) Hot on its heels in 1934 came Masaoka‘s Chagama Ondo (The Dance of the Chagamas), the first anime made entirely with cels. Animating with cels – characters and moving elements painted on transparent sheets of celluloid layered over each other and a background – was a vast improvement over chalk and paper cutouts, but it was a much bigger expense. Studios had to get more creative in finding sources of funding. Promotional videos made and paid for by the government flourished. As the military began gearing up for war, many animators turned their hands to propaganda. On the civilian side, educational films were made for children and advertising pieces were animated for commercial companies. All of these uses of anime continue today. Propaganda proved particularly lucrative during World War II and the film studios grew larger with the additional funding. The first full-length anime film was Momotaro: Umi no Shinpei (Momotaro, Sacred Sailors), released in 1945. A propaganda film commissioned by the Japanese navy featuring anthropomorphic animals, its underlying message of hope for peace would move a young manga artist named Osamu Tezuka to tears. Remember that name; he’ll prove to be fairly important in a few paragraphs. The 1950s: Some Familiar Names Appear After the war, we begin seeing names recognizable to even casual anime fans today. Japan Animated Films was founded in 1948, but you probably know them as Toei, the film company which bought Japan Animated Films in 1956 to create an animated division. They released Hakujaden (The Tale of the White Serpent) in 1958. With a runtime of 78 minutes, it was the first feature-length color anime film. It would come out in America three years later in 1961. Hakujaden was not the first anime to cross the Pacific – film aficionados have been shipping each other reels since the beginning of the medium – but it emphasized that markets overseas could be lucrative sources of additional revenue. With its colorful characters and easily-replaced dialog, animation was especially easy to port across the seas. Depending on the hoped-for market, anime was and still is often deliberately set in places outside of Japan or otherwise downplays its national origin to make it more palatable to overseas audiences and wallets. But remember Osamu Tezuka? By the late ‘50s he’d become a pretty popular manga artist – and by pretty popular, I mean he’s now reverentially referred to as the “god of manga.” In 1958, he began working with Toei to animate his series Boku no Son Goku (Son-Goku the Monkey King). During his time with Toei, Tezuka would prove to be a bit of a rabble-rouser, agitating for unionization. After his contract expired, he left to found his own studio, Mushi Production, a.k.a. Mushi Pro for short, and he took some of Toei’s best animators with him. Included on that list was the first woman animator in Japan we know of, Kazuko Nakamura. She would later serve as the animation director for Ribon no Kishi (Princess Knight). Even if you haven’t heard of Mushi Pro, if you’ve seen any anime at all it’s very likely you’ve seen the work of at least one animator who cut their teeth at the famous studio. The 1960s: Television Prior to 1958, if you wanted to see animation, you had to go to a theater or have a wealthy friend with a projector and access to reels. Television changed that. The earliest animation to air on the fledgling medium was Mogura no Aventure (Mole’s Adventure). It was in color, used paper cut-outs, and was nine minutes long. Two years later in 1960, an experimental animated anthology called Mittsu no Hanashi (Three Tales) was created and aired by NHK as a special. Comprised of three ten-minute segments telling fantasy tales, it would make the journey to the United States the next year, where it was the first anime to air on American television. In 1961, the anime Otogi Manga Calendar began regularly airing on Japanese TV. Each episode explored “what happened on this day in history,” sometimes supplementing its animation with historical photographs. The episodes were only three minutes long, but the series notched up an impressive 312 of them during its initial run. Three minutes, however, isn’t what usually comes to mind when we think of an anime episode. We think twenty-five minutes, give or take time for commercials. What was the first anime in the format we know and love today? In 1963, Tezuka and Mushi Pro debuted the very first anime TV series we would recognize as such, Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy). Based on one of Tezuka’s most popular manga, the show starred a robot boy who lived with humans and regularly battled crime, aliens, and other robots. Anime had never been tried on TV in a half-hour timeslot before due to cost and deadline concerns. How could such a time-intensive process ever be used to profitably air a show a week? Tezuka used what is called “limited animation”: techniques such as reducing the number of frames (images) per second of film, re-using cels, and putting different parts of a character, like the head or arms, on different layers of cels so that only the part of the body moving needed to be animated in each scene. He also saved time by using his original manga panels as storyboards, eliminating much of the need to write and layout individual episodes. Tetsuwan Atom was a huge success with high ratings, merchandise galore, and syndication in dozens of countries. One of those countries was the United States, where it would be watched in black and white on TV by Todd Ferson. He’d go on to found Right Stuf with his friend Shawne Kleckner 25 years later on the strength of that robot boy with a big heart, but that’s another story… Many tropes we think of when we think “anime” today were codified by Tetsuwan Atom, including big eyes, robot battles, and stylized hair impossible to achieve in normal gravity. It was the coolest thing on TV and everyone loved it! …mostly. Its popularity surprised many of the more “serious” Japanese animators. Limited animation is comprised of literally cheap tricks, so how can it compare to the fluid animation and artistry of carefully crafted films? Can limited animation be art? This argument about limited animation versus fluid animation is another aspect of anime that continues today. Tetsuwan Atom proved definitively that anime could be made for TV and be profitable. Tele-Cartoon Japan (TCJ, or Eiken post-1969) jumped on the bandwagon with Sennin Buraku (Hermit Village) in the fall of 1963. Based on a popular manga, the story was a risqué romantic comedy set in historical China and aired in a late-night spot. Tetsujin 28-Go (Iron Man No. 28), also from TCJ and about a boy and his giant robot, hit the air just a month later in October, though you may know it by its American name, Gigantor. That’s right: the first TV anime series for kids, the first TV anime series for adults, and the first giant-robot anime all came out over half a century ago in the very same year. The next year in 1964, Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS) formed, and their first animated release was a TV series called Big X. You could say it was influenced by Tezuka – he wrote the manga it was based on (“god of manga,” remember). Over the years, TMS and its subsidiaries, including A Production, Shin-Ei Animation, and Telecom Animation Film, would frequently supplement their original productions with outsourced work for other companies, most notably Disney. Tetsuwan Atom’s first year was done on a small budget from Fuji TV plus money from a candy sponsor, but the next year money came in from a surprising source: NBC in America, which was running an adaptation of the series to good ratings. This enabled better animation for later episodes of Tetsuwan Atom, but the bigger effect would be on an industry that had just discovered a new source of income. Animation studios trying to replicate the series’ domestic and international success began popping up left and right - and sometimes closing just as fast when they learned even limited animation still takes a lot of work, and not every story is as popular as one of Tezuka’s established manga properties. NBC didn’t need an endless number of Tetsuwan Atom episodes, but they liked Tezuka. They asked him for a new show, specifying that this series had to be in color or else American audiences wouldn’t be interested. Cost? NBC would pay for the expense of converting Mushi Pro to color. Tezuka agreed (free color!), and despite some friction between the creator and the American company (Tezuka kept trying to slip in death scenes and continuity; NBC kept trying to edit them out), Jungle Emperor (Kimba the White Lion) debuted in the fall of 1965, the very first color anime TV series and a popular success. Not to be outdone, Toei put out the first “shojo” (targeted at girls between 6 and 15) and magical girl anime in 1966. Based on a manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, who’d also written Tetsujin 28-Go, Mahotsukai Sally (Sally the Witch) starred young witch princess Sally, who accidentally teleported to Earth and then stayed to have fun with her new friends. The first episodes were produced in black and white, but episodes 18 onward were made in color and the show had success in numerous other countries. The 1970s: Robots, Literature, and Art Tezuka left Mushi Pro in 1968 to found Tezuka Productions. Mushi Pro, facing budgetary difficulties and without its founder, closed in 1973. Several of its former animators founded studios of their own, to the point where for a while it seemed that the Venn diagram between studios founded in the ‘70s and studios founded by Mushi Pro staffers was a neat circle. Two of these studios you might recognize: Madhouse and Sunrise, both founded in fall 1972. In the years after Tezuka left and prior to closing, Mushi Pro had been contracted to produce animation for film studio Zuiyo Eizo. In 1974, Zuiyo Eizo began producing animation itself, most notably Alps no Shojo Heidi (Heidi, Girl of the Alps). Heidi was instantly popular, which might not surprise you if you recognize the names of its director, Isao Takahata, and layout director, Hayao Miyazaki. If you don’t, don’t worry, they’ll be mentioned again later. Despite Heidi’s success, Zuiyo Eizo was in debt the next year and split into two companies. Company one, Zuiyo, got the debt, and company two, Nippon Animation, got the animation staff. Building on Heidi and other Zuiyo Eizo-produced works, Nippon Animation created World Masterpiece Theater, a long-running series adapting classic literature from around the world such as Dog of Flanders and Anne of Green Gables. Conveniently, these stories were also easy to export around the world, bringing in more money for Nippon Animation. Anime continued to grow and define itself through the ‘70s, especially in regards to science fiction. The first space-opera series, Uchu Senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato), debuted in 1974 from Group TAC, (yet) another studio formed by former Mushi Pro staffers. It told a serious and complex story and would be a huge influence on later Japanese sci-fi. In 1979, it was released in America as Star Blazers and sparked interest in American fans who liked this cartoon with more mature themes and over-arching plot than their Saturday morning cartoon offerings. By the end of the ‘70s, anime was fully cemented as part of Japanese popular culture. Animage, a magazine devoted to anime and manga, debuted in July 1978, giving fans a place for the latest news and articles about their hobby. Soon, the term “otaku” would be coined to describe those who were especially “intense” about their hobby. Two Japanese cultural institutions made their appearance in 1979. Sunrise released Mobile Suit Gundam, in which giant robots were given a take grounded in science and politics. The show wasn’t actually too popular – until Bandai bought the merchandise rights and started releasing Gundam model kits. Since then, over 70 Gundam series, specials, and movies have been made and hundreds of millions of model kits sold. Meanwhile, Shin-Ei Animation (a TMS subsidiary) decided to bring back Doraemon, a comedy series based on a manga about a time-traveling cat-robot that had previously been adapted to the small screen in 1973. That version lasted 26 episodes, but Shin-Ei’s Doraemon would carry on for an astounding 1,787. It “ended” in 2005 only to be immediately replaced a month later with a new Doraemon featuring updated designs and voice actors, still produced by Shin-Ei and still going. The 1980s: The Golden Age The 1980s are considered the “golden age” of anime and saw a huge explosion of genres and interest. Many factors contributed to this, including the introduction of VHS and children who were inspired by Tetsuwan Atom twenty years ago, growing up and becoming nostalgic for their favorite shows. Mamoru Oshii directed Urusei Yatsura in 1981 for Studio Pierrot, founded just two years later by former animators of Tatsunoko Pro and (you guessed it) Mushi Pro. The series based on Rumiko Takahashi’s manga about a lecherous human, the playful alien he accidentally becomes engaged to, and their friends became a huge hit and introduced the now practically required practice of promoting pop songs via the show’s opening and ending sequences. The sports anime formula was codified in 1983 with Captain Tsubasa by Tsuchida Pro, a show about soccer (or football for non-American audiences), teamwork, and friendship. It inspired a generation of soccer players and manga writers and set the standard for anime sports moves of ever-increasing coolness and improbability. VHS and other home recording/playing devices were coming onto the market in the early ‘80s and anime was at the forefront. Urusei Yatsura was available on VHS in late 1983, and the OAV (original video animation, Japan’s version of a straight-to-DVD movie) was invented in the same year. No one was much interested in the first OAV, Oshii’s Moon Base Dallos, but it wouldn’t take long before more popular titles began driving the market upwards. Another technological first in 1983 was CGI (computer generated imagery). TMS’s Golgo 13 used CGI in several scenes, most notably to show helicopters circling a skyscraper. It was the first significant use of CGI in an animated film not just in Japan, but anywhere. The biggest news of 1984 was Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). Produced by Isao Takahata and directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki (those talented guys who worked on Heidi), it was the first film of what would become the prestigious Studio Ghibli. That same year, Daicon Films was founded in 1984 by a group of university students. Never heard of Daicon? That’s because they changed their name the next year to Gainax. But if auteur-driven OAVs and hugely influential movies and studios aren’t quite your thing, 1984 saw another first. Now that people could buy anime and watch it in their own homes, circumventing the censors and public attention of TV and theaters, you can probably guess what industry was quick to step up. The first “hentai” (pornographic) release was Lolita Anime, though Cream Lemon from the same year is better known. More titles followed quickly and profitably. In 1986, Toei animated Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball. The show proved incredibly popular, to put it lightly. If there’s a “shonen” (targeted at boys around ages 6 to 15) series you’ve enjoyed in the last 30 years featuring drawn-out battles and ever-increasing hero power-ups, its author probably watched Dragon Ball or its successor Dragon Ball Z as a kid. Anime sources were expanding. Manga, novels, and original stories continued to be as popular choices as ever, but video games (1986, Super Mario Brothers) and light novels (1988, Legend of the Galactic Heroes) would soon prove fruitful ground as well. The types of stories being adapted also expanded. The first BL (“boy’s love,” also known as “yaoi” or “shonen-ai” and featuring gay relationships targeted at women) anime was an OAV called Kaze to Ki no Uta (The Poem of Wind and Trees). It was animated by small studio Office Next-One in 1987. Thanks to the money from home releases, licensing abroad, and the economic bubble Japan was in, budgets were increasing. Nowhere was this more evident than with Akira in 1988. Akira was lavished with money, and it showed on the screen in fluid animation. Where Tetsuwan Atom got by with 8 or less frames of animation per second, Akira used 24. It was the first anime to use pre-recorded dialog, where the dialog is recorded and then the animators match the mouth movements to the sound instead of the (much cheaper) other way around. For years after, it was the anime of choice to show friends how amazing this medium you loved could look. The 1990s: Crash Budgets never go up indefinitely, of course. Japan’s economy crashed in 1991, and budgets were cut back and many anime film and OAV studios closed. Even in a recession, however, entertainment is always popular. Studio Ghibli weathered the storm on the strength of their latest hit, Majo no Takkyubin (Kiki’s Delivery Service), and TV continued to be fertile ground for funding. Toei released Sailor Moon in 1992, for example, to huge commercial success. In 1995, Gainax released Neon Genesis Evangelion, a deconstruction of the giant-robot genre full of intriguing iconography, dark themes, and broken but likable characters. It immediately caught the attention of the anime world, and would have an influence on robot shows going forward that cannot be overstated. In addition to its takes on robot technology and the psychology of using teenagers as pilots, Evangelion’s two main heroines left huge marks on the anime world. Asuka and Rei respectively characterized what would be come to known as the popular “tsundere” and “moe” personality types. (Tsundere refers to a character who initially acts cold but warms up later, while moe is approximately a cute character you feel intense protective feelings for.) Asuka and Rei weren’t the first written in this mold (Urusei Yatsura probably holds that distinction), but the amount of merchandise sold featuring the girls was and is a juggernaut that still rakes in the yen today. The first anime based on a video game was Super Mario Brothers: Peach-hime Kyuushutsu Daisakusen (Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach) in 1986, but the genre came into its own spectacularly and profitably with Pokemon in 1997. It’s still on the air and studios are still trying to replicate its international success. Video games, of course, aren’t just demographically targeted at kids, and adult-oriented visual novel games (particularly, yes, the erotic ones) began to be mined for source material as well. The first of these was Sentimental Journey in 1998, and the genre boomed in the 2000s. Anime was continuing to grow up and diversify. OAVs could be as gory, experimental, or esoterically random and comedic as writers could dream up. Late-night anime like Serial Experiments Lain in 1998 delved into serious philosophical themes with stylish and sophisticated animation. Speaking of style, Studio Bones was founded in 1998 by Sunrise staffers, and their first project was a collaboration with Sunrise to make the jazzy space romp Cowboy Bebop: Tengoku no Tobira (Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door). The 2000s: Computers and a Bubble Since the mid-1930s, anime had been almost exclusively animated on cels. During the ‘90s, CGI became increasingly commonplace as a supplemental technique. The ease with which computers could manipulate images even won over traditional-animation purist Miyazaki, who used CGI on 1997’s Mononoke-Hime (Princess Mononoke) to animate demonic tendrils and a few other effects after his staff demonstrated how seamlessly they could blend the animation in. The first completely computer animated anime, A.LI.CE., arrived in 1999. Being still relatively early CGI, it didn’t look like “anime,” and by this point in time the anime look we associate with the genre was very clearly defined. As more and more studios began making use of the new digital technology, most of them chose methods that blended well with hand-drawn cels. As computer processing capacity increased and prices went down, studios replaced cels altogether with digital ink and paint. In this method, after each frame is drawn it is scanned into a computer, then colored and composited digitally instead of being transferred to a cel and colored and composited by hand. Being able to use a computer to quickly handle tedious work was, unsurprisingly, popular, and most studios had made the switch as soon as 2005. The last hold-out was Eiken with Sazae-san, the longest-running animated show in the world. If it ain’t broke (and your graphics haven’t evolved too much from your 1969 origins), why fix it? But even Sazae-san eventually bowed to modern convenience and made the digital switch in 2013. In the early 2000s, anime was once again flourishing. A series of hits buoyed the market both at home and abroad. These included long-runners like One Piece (1999), Naruto (2002), and Bleach (2004) that cross-promoted manga sales, movies, video games, and merchandise with no end to their runs in sight. Overseas licensing boomed, and Studio Ghibli’s Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) took the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2002. The internet was facilitating global conversations between fans, who eagerly discussed their favorite (and not-so-favorite) shows in minute detail with each other. The increasing ease of sharing anime for free through the internet was a source of contention for producers worried about revenue, but like VHS before it studios began experimenting with ways to monetize this new distribution channel. The first ONA (original net anime) came out in 2000. Produced by J.C. Staff, it was just four minutes long and adapted a short story from the four-panel manga Azumanga Daioh. The plan was to see if there was enough interest to create a series of episodes for the internet, but there was so much interest they made a traditional (or as traditional as comedy Azumanga got) anime TV series instead. Short internet series came soon after, and the first full-length (22-episode) ONA anime series, Maho Yugi (Magical Play), debuted in 2002. It also made the jump to TV based on its success. Going in the other direction, however, of TV to online streaming would prove a little longer in coming due to concerns about licensing, revenue, and piracy. In 2006, the market was oversaturated with choice. Just like the end of the 1980s, anime was in a bubble, and just like the end of the 1980s, the economy was about to crash. This time, it was America’s market and then economy that went down first and hardest, but Japan was already in a long recession. Those ever-increasing foreign licensing fees had been forming no small part of many of the more esoteric and adult-targeted anime budgets. Series with alternate revenue streams like merchandise sales carried on just fine, but shows relying on DVD sales and commercial sponsors faced a problem. The number of new series created each year dipped from a high point of 159 titles in 2006 to 118 in 2010. Just like the ‘90s, the surviving studios came up with new avenues to carry on. A popular solution was to cater to increasingly niche demographics, relying on the sale of very expensive DVDs and, later, Blu-rays to hardcore fans. Moe titles, which encourages viewers to want to protect (and obsess) over characters, proved effective at moving merchandise and inspiring fan devotion. Light novels (Japanese cheap pulp fiction) became especially popular for source material in 2006 after the enormous success of Kyoto Animation’s Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya), and the trend hasn’t stopped yet. Another funding option was to find demographics that previously hadn’t been targeted much and start offering them what they wanted, such as women who enjoy BL titles. 2007 would see a high point for the genre with five OAVs and a TV series released. A television timeblock targeted at adult women who usually didn’t watch anime at all called Noitamina (“animation” backwards) had started before the crash in 2005 and continued afterwards to be a reliable source of good titles with solid ratings. And if you don’t have a big new hit on your hands and don’t want to risk experimenting, why not remake what worked in the past? 2009 saw popular remakes in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Dragon Ball Z: Kai, and Hunter x Hunter got a successful revival in 2011. Studios became extra-cautious with non-proven proprieties. Where once a picked-up show might get an order for 26 or 52 episodes (two seasons or a full year), now 13 episodes (one season) is far more common. If the series sells well enough on DVD or moves enough licensed merchandise, another 13 episodes can be ordered later, and so on until sales dwindle. While convenient for producers, it can be difficult for the staff, who don’t know if they’ll be continuing production after their current season. If a long amount of time passes between seasons, new staff may be needed who have to pick up where someone else left off years ago. Studios are not homogenous monoliths, and friction has existed for a long time between those in charge and the staffers doing the grunt drawing work. Remember, Tezuka wanted unionization back at Toei in 1958. The 2000s crash put additional downward pressure on animators’ salaries, which weren’t high to begin with thanks to low budgets and foreign competition. While Japanese companies frequently animated American cartoons in the ‘80s, today Japan often outsources animation itself to countries such as India, China, and South Korea. The work of decades finally paid off in 2007 and the very first union for Japanese animators was established: The Japan Animation Creators Association. Membership included animators new and old alike, with the first president being Toyo Ashida, who got his start all the way back in the early days of 1965 with Eiken. Along with better communication between colleagues in the field and support in bringing attention to low salaries and poor working conditions, the biggest benefit for members was access at long last to group healthcare. In 2008, studio GONZO was suffering from financial issues and decided to aggressively begin courting the Western market. To this end, they partnered with Japanese digital entertainment company BOST and American website Crunchyroll to launch the very first anime “simulcasts.” A simulcast streams episodes around the world (or at least to whichever regions the licensors have agreed to) on the same day they’re broadcast in their home country. The first two titles distributed this way were GONZO’s Druaga no To ~the Aegis of URUK~ (Tower of Druaga) and Blassreiter. There were a couple restrictions - the simulcasts only had English subtitles and couldn’t be watched from within Japan - but the response from Western fans was immediate and positive. The next year in 2009, Japanese television station and anime distributer TV Tokyo struck a deal with Crunchyroll to legally stream one of the most popular anime in the world, Naruto: Shippuden. Simulcasts and streaming are now ubiquitous to the point where it’s surprising if an anime doesn’t have an online option. The 2010s: Today Between increased global communication and Blu-ray regions putting Japan in the same region as North and South America, studios slowly have begun to tackle international releases themselves instead of relying on outside intermediaries. This has included creating their own online streaming sites, such as DAISUKI.net in 2013, and releasing Blu-rays simultaneously in Japan and North America, unfathomable just a decade ago. Anime is recognized around the world as a reliable source of entertainment and art. Where early Japanese animators were inspired by the works of Disney, now Western shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Samurai Jack are taking their cues from Japan. Studios continue to adapt to advances in the way stories are told. One of the most popular shows on the air right now, One-Punch Man, is based on a webcomic. Two different short anime series have been made for the express purpose of viewing on mobile phones. The barriers to animation are being lowered by programs like Flash and Maya, and amateur animators can put their work directly on the internet for fans without needing a TV deal or a distributor. So much has happened in just 99 years. It’s impossible to know where we’ll be in another century, but by looking at the past we can make some pretty educated guesses. Studios will rise and fall, budgets will expand and contract, Sazae-san will keep running, and animators will innovate with the latest technology to tell timeless stories – or whatever their sponsors will pay for in the meantime. And because those stories will be rooted in the rich history of anime, using techniques of Japanese storytelling and animation passed from animator to animator, they will continue to win fans the world over. -Lisa Marie Cooper You may recognize Lisa as Marie from the Anime Today podcast or as the tireless promotion-pusher and question-answerer RightStufSpecialsMinion on the AnimeNewsNetwork and Fandom Post forums. Her latest works can be found at PositivelyEditorial.com, where she writes about writing.